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For all its excesses, high-quality audio is filled with purists. Some are committed to single-ended amplifiers, some to all-analog circuitry, to crossoverless speakers, or to recordings made with only two microphones. Purists seek simplicity in their quest for good sound. But how simple is it to scrub contacts, adjust tonearms, or meticulously clean discs before nearly every listening session? Maybe committed purists should just be committed.

Using a personal computer as an audio component has certainly gained ground with gearheads in the last several years, and many new products, such as media servers, blur the line between a traditional component and a PC. At the same time, the general public is still resisting the idea of booting up their stereos or TVs.

<B>Editor's Note: </B>Stereophile<I> writer Richard (Rick) J. Rosen passed away suddenly on Monday August 22, of unknown causes. Rick wrote show reports and the occasional software review for the magazine, but his highest-profile contributions were his "Rick Visits..." series of interviews, where he hung out with music makers, asking them about their systems, of course, but also their relationships with recorded music. The first of these was with famed keyboard player Al Kooper in our October 1995 issue, and I was proud, as an editor, to be able to publish such superbly crafted prose.

<I>Mom fights back:</I> As we've previously <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/020705riaa/">reported</A&gt;, the recording industry hasn't shied away from pursuing individuals it suspects of illegal downloading from peer-to-peer networks through the RIAA's "John Doe" lawsuits, most of which have intimidated the recipients into making out-of-court settlements. This strategy has, on several occasions, made the organization look foolish&mdash;as it assuredly did when it served a deceased 83-year-old.

Naxos, the world's leading distributor of classical music, has just signed a worldwide digital distribution deal with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), which will use its Digital Distribution Dashboard (D3) technology platform to distribute and manage music files from the Naxos family of distributed music labels. The deal entails distributing titles to many of Naxos' 22 Digital Service Providers, including Sony Connect, Rhapsody, iTunes, Napster, and Microsoft (which charges consumers the lowest download price of all: $4.99 for an entire Naxos CD).

It occurred to me recently that, after nearly a decade of specializing in reviewing affordable speakers, and with the exceptions of two entry-level Mission models, I'd never taken a look at recent designs from the large mainstream British speaker manufacturers. So with this review I embark on a Bob Reina "British Invasion" tour to seek out the most innovative and value-conscious designs from companies that have been household names in British stereo shoppes for decades.

"You're reviewing a <I>class-D</I> amplifier?" whined John Atkinson. "I <I>hate</I> measuring those."